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The filming
process.
 For Jackson and the majority of his New Zealand-based team, shifting into “Kong mode” was a continuation of the intensive work to which they had long been accustomed—the finished King Kong would feature more total effects work than the entire Rings trilogy combined.
He elaborates, “In some regards—in terms of our production infrastructure and the logistics—Kong was like a fourth Lord of the Rings film. And so we were able to keep everybody and all of the pipeline intact, which has been wonderful for the movie. During the year that we did the post-production on Return of the King, we were doing animatics [broad-stroke, animated storyboards] for King Kong, like the Tyrannosaurus fight, where that sequence was being created. And then we were immediately able to finish off Return of the King and start shooting the jungle shots for the T. rex sequences with the miniature team. And so it seemed that it was much more sensible, really, to just keep production rolling.”
So, long before cameras rolled (principal photography began in September of 2004), a group of more than 450 visual effects artists were busy at work, developing and creating the range of practical and digital art and effects necessary to ultimately render King Kong as a seamless, fantasy-filled whole. Early digital conceptual renderings (long gone are the days of executing in acrylics, oils, pastels and graphite) were completed by Gus Hunter and Jeremy Bennett, who worked closely with Jackson to realize his vision. By the time the film reached post, both men had completed an estimated 2,500 renderings apiece. Some of the high-resolution elements from the concept artists (a stormy sky, for example) were used directly by matte painters and compositors, making the end result much closer to the original concept illustrations.
One of the biggest differences between filming The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong was the use (or lack of use) of practical location as setting. Jackson says, “When we were starting Kong, I think everybody was assuming that New Zealand was a great location. We’ve got sort of rain forests here, but at the end of the day, when you go into these forests, they just look like Hawaii or anything else you’ve seen a million times on film. We had some wonderful conceptual art done—beautiful renderings—with these huge, over-scale, twisted, deformed trees and rock bridges and endless chasms that plummet down. It’s like a jungle from hell—the most twisted, tortured terrain you can imagine. And I just knew looking at the pictures that we were never going to find a location like that. So we decided, very early on, that if we were really going to make Skull Island look like the conceptual art, that creating it artificially was the only way to do it.”
The resulting look of Skull Island is an exaggerated design, where realism has been supplanted by painterly extreme—a land where evolution has been left unchecked for millions of years. The heavy reliance on a digital environment also allowed Jackson the opportunity to utilize some of the same effects components (i.e., miniatures) that contributed to the look of the original feature.
“It gives you a connection to the 1933 movie—the tabletop model with the multi-plane paintings and the depth that sort of hazes off into a milky, low-contrast, deep background jungle. It gave us an ability to actually match and to re-create that. So I’ve been able to make our style and feel quite reminiscent of the original tabletop, miniature Skull Island, which is fine by me. It’s realistic enough for the movie, but it still has a slightly stylized feel,” offers Jackson.
Senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri adds, “The main thing about Skull Island as a location is something that Peter really wanted for this film, which was to create the feeling that this is the same Skull Island that we saw in the 1933 version. We want to feel like we’re on the same island, but now we can see so much more of it because the cameras are better. We have to perceive of it as a real place. It has to look real, but it has to have all the fantastical qualities that the original one had.”
Utilizing more than just a single “tabletop,” Weta craftsmen eventually created a total of 53 miniature sets/models. The impressive, detailed work focusing on the ‘kit-set’ miniature jungle was a painstaking process that gave rise to 104,000 pieces of artificial foliage; 3,100 latex vines; 1,500 fabric vines; 25,000 live miniature-scale plants; 120 miniature-scale articulated trees; 100 miniature-scale non-articulated trees; plus a plethora of root systems, bark texture panels, mosses and other flora that all combine to make up the intricacies of this primordial jungle.
To construct each of those miniatures, Richard Taylor—in charge of special makeup, creatures and miniatures—and his team of Weta artists started with a piece of conceptual artwork (and where available, a previs—short for “pre-visualization”—model); from there, a small tabletop-size maquette (small structure or statue) was designed and presented to Jackson for review. Once approved, the basic shape was carved out of blocks of polystyrene. From this base, rock and/or architectural textures were applied and foamed together for painting—which took multiple layers, usually four or more, to create the depth of color required. All of this work was done by hand at Weta Workshop. To give a sense of scale, the largest miniature used by production was constructed in two pieces, each measuring 19m long, 2.6m wide and 5.5m high for a total size of 38m long by 5.2m wide by 5.5m high.
The crew of Weta Digital then worked to embellish the miniatures with additional CG and 2-D elements, supplementing with layers of incredible detail. To accomplish this, special programmatic tools were written that enable artists to dress the Island in a unique way—for example, a vine tool can place and “grow” vines anywhere realistic plants are required. On the finished shots of Skull Island, there are hundreds of species of fully digital plants and dozens of different types of trees…all of which are interactive and photo real.
The same philosophy of stylization and evolution-run-amok was applied to the fauna that inhabit Skull Island. Jackson was specific in his vision that included “just kind of cool-looking” dinosaurs…ones that differ from the currently accepted paleontological research of how these creatures probably looked.
Jackson comments, “We deliberately wanted to throw back a bit to the old-fashioned movie dinosaurs, where they have big scales on their backs and spiky bits, and that sort of crocodile kind of skin texture that they didn’t have. And so we threw all that out and just went down the movie dinosaur road—we created a bunch of fictitious dinosaurs, really.”
While there are examples of recognizable ones (particularly the sequences involving a Brontosaurus stampede and a battle between Kong and three Tyrannosaurus rex), even these have Skull Island peculiarities. And some of the beasts—flying lizard-like creatures, for example—never existed at all, except in the 65-million-year-old evolutionary hothouse of Skull Island. Building on historically accurate dinosaur skeletal structures, Weta took creative Darwinian license with the shapes, textures and colors, even going so far as to create one entirely new species, aptly named the Wetasaur. “They’re actually original designs; they’re not Tyranodons or things like that. They’re just creatures that we designed ourselves that we thought would look good in Skull Island,” adds Jackson.
A design process similar to the one utilized to develop and create the miniature sets was employed to give birth to the Skull Island dinosaurs. Final conceptual art was transformed into hand-sculpted creature design maquettes, of which there were more than 150. Ten large “high-level,” detailed creature maquettes were completed for digital scanning, each one taking approximately 1,500 hours to complete. Dinosaurs’ dead ancestors—in the form of full-size T. rex, Brontosaurus and Ceratops skeletons—were built for set specificity.
Amazingly, more creatures were created for Kong than for the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
To create the frightening, primitive tribe on the Island, 100 actors were transformed into Skull Islanders by donning Weta-designed costumes (constructed from sea shells, feathers, fish and animal bones and human hair), wigs (a portion of which were hand-knotted), makeup, body paint, prosthetic teeth and weapons. While of the same tribe, different looks were created by varying the weapons, wigs and contact lenses. For a handful of actors given featured parts (the feral child, the shaman and the drummers), their longer time on camera meant more work to produce their looks—the actress playing the shaman spent five hours in the chair with three prosthetic and makeup technicians working to transform her into the terrifying crone. Additionally, as the Islanders are first seen during a rainstorm, Weta workers developed a waterproof process for coloring their skin.
Initial designs for the most famous Islander—Kong himself—were completed by Gus Hunter in May of 2003. The biggest challenge in his design: to create a realistic gorilla, yet one with features that make him unique and instantly recognizable from other silverbacks. Once a firm design direction was established by Jackson, sculptors developed a three-dimensional study of Kong, which was reviewed and tweaked regularly until the look was finally locked. From there, Weta molded and produced a maquette that was sent for digital scanning; these scans produced data as the first step in Weta Digital’s process to create what would become the onscreen Kong.
For Richard Taylor, the intensive work involved during the production was a reward unto itself. He says, “The most enjoyable aspect of working on King Kong for me is that Weta Workshop has been involved in the film at many levels, from the conception and design of the creatures—including the development of one of the cinema’s greatest icons, King Kong—to the exploration of the unique cultures of the island, both present and past. It has been a creative challenge that we have reveled in: the chance to reinvigorate and redefine a unique look for a world so powerfully brought to life on the screen over 70 years ago.”
The creation of that icon posed special challenges to Weta Digital. As a leading actor in the story, the great ape’s believability would be paramount—a tough call for any performer, let alone an entirely digital invention. Key to that was the creation of a Kong that could nail the performance, non-verbally communicating a full range of emotions and thoughts. Joe Letteri explains, “The hardest thing about creating Kong’s performance was that it had to be recognizable in a human way. We have to be able to read his emotions and understand what he’s thinking—especially because he can’t speak. Gorillas are so close to humans that it’s really easy to imbue them with human characteristics. We had to convey a sense of what Kong was thinking, but not make him human. What we tried to do is find a performance based on a human performance, so we could produce it and understand it, but also have it equally grounded in the gorilla world. We wanted Kong to be a wild creature experiencing everything he experiences in the story.”
Weta Digital went about building the musculature of the body and the face, and then covering the 25-foot creature with fur—new tools were specifically developed to accomplish these crucial tasks. The digital effects team began by scanning the completed maquette of Kong’s hand, foot, head and body into the computer. By shifting the development of their leading ape from the real world to the digital one, they were able to continue to modify the creature in response to direction from Jackson well into the production cycle. The team then tackled the challenge of digitally covering Kong with fur (rendering photorealistic digital hair and fur is one of the most problematic tasks in the art, even with the cutting-edge software developed by Weta).
As it turns out, Kong was not the only character fashioned by Weta Digital. Advances in the film software technology responsible for digital doubling meant that the cast of King Kong (or any possible stunt doubles) would not be called upon to perform a myriad of super-human feats called for in Walsh, Boyens and Jackson’s screenplay. Eventual scenes of characters fighting, falling, leaping, being carried (or eaten) and a litany of other tasks would be completed by fully digitized facsimiles of the actors (who, like the maquettes, were scanned digitally and then photo realistically constructed by Weta team members).
Once principal photography began, Andy Serkis was called to be Kong for his fellow actors, providing on-set reference and functioning as an emotionally present participant in the scenes. During these instances, the actor performed in a custom-made Kong suit—fitted with musculature, arm extensions and a hood that extended the shoulders and created a no-neck look—that allowed Serkis to mimic the physicality of a gorilla, such as walking on all fours. To supply Kong’s roaring, the sound department developed a “Kongalizer,” a system that took Serkis’ wordless vocal responses (picked up by a headset mic), ran them through a computer (which dropped the range and increased the size), and then broadcast them through a wall of speakers in real time. For key, intimate moments with Watts, the suited and Kongalized Serkis not only partnered in the scene, but also provided sight lines for the actress, often from the correct vantage point of 25 feet off the ground—accomplished by raising the actor in a cherry picker.
Peter Jackson elaborates, “Andy was able to be on-set every day, and he was able to stand in for Kong. He’s obviously not 25 feet tall, but we were able to put him on ladders, up in cherry pickers, do whatever we needed to do to make him the right height. Most critically he was there for Naomi, who would be delivering this incredible performance as Ann relating to Kong…and she had Andy to look at and talk to. She had Andy’s eyes to look into when she wanted to make these moments as real as possible. I think it would be virtually impossible for an actor to get that level of performance if they were just acting to a yellow tennis ball on a stick. It just would never happen that way. So it was critical to have somebody there.”
Serkis adds, “You know, these were absolutely significant moment-to-moment emotions that were traded between us. And so really, I could have been wearing anything. It was very much through the eyes, but once we locked into each other…that was it. You have to give as truthful a performance as in any other kind of film. I mean, Pete makes fantasy films, but he does it through a dramatic keyhole so that there is a sense of total reality.”
Watts comments, “I had no idea what to expect. I had been told that a good two-thirds of the movie was opposite Kong, so how would that translate into the performance? I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be looking at a mark on a stick and pretending there’s a connection…ooh, this is going to be hard.’ But with Andy doing it, I had a pair of eyes to look into, a soul to connect with—what a relief! And what a privilege. I could not have done anything without him. I don’t know that there’s another actor out there who could have done what he did with the amount of preparation and work he put into it. It was mind-blowing on a daily basis.”
In addition to enacting Kong during principal photography, Serkis was called upon to re-create all of his scenes on a motion-capture stage, covered in sensors, during the lengthy post-production phase—in essence, filming his entire performance twice.
Letteri summarizes, “Kong’s facial animation has been created by keyframe animation from the Weta Digital animation team and by facial motion capture performed by Andy Serkis. Our animation team have studied gorilla behavior and Andy’s gorilla performance and have blended the two to create the unique character of Kong.”
Serkis’ valuable motion-capture reference helped to drive the character of Kong and ultimately resulted in the ferocious, physical and amazing creature that rules both the jungles of his home and the manmade ones in New York City (at least, for a time).
Next: Recreating 1930's
New York
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